Wyoming works to solve patchwork oil-gas pipeline routes

Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead, left, makes an appearance at the ceremonial opening of the Greencore Pipeline on Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2012 just east of Powder River in Natrona County, Wyo. The 232-mile pipeline will carry carbon dioxide to oil fields in Wyoming and Montana for use in enhanced oil recovery. The gas is injected underground to help bring oil to the surface, increasing the overall output of wells and leaving less oil behind. (AP Photo/The Casper Star-Tribune, Alan Rogers)

A hub of the Greencore Pipeline is shown just east of Powder River in Natrona County, Wyo. The 232-mile pipeline will carry carbon dioxide to oil fields in Wyoming and Montana for use in enhanced oil recovery. The gas is injected underground to help bring oil to the surface, increasing the overall output of wells and leaving less oil behind. (AP Photo/Star-Tribune, Alan Rogers)

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Brian Jeffries likes to tell people he’s glad the interstate highway system wasn’t designed like Wyoming’s pipeline corridors.

“If the highway system had been done like these corridors, I-90 at the Montana border would end at a fence line,” the director of the Wyoming Pipeline Authority told an audience at the Wyoming Natural Resources Rendezvous in December.

Wyoming has 10 U.S. Bureau of Land Management offices. Each is responsible for developing land use plans for its allotted area. Nearly half of the land in Wyoming belongs to the federal government and much of it is managed by the BLM.

The plans include pipeline corridors — areas of low impact considered ideal for pipeline placement — on federal land. But with 10 offices each making their own plans, those corridors don’t always form a clear path across the state.

The pipeline authority, with cooperation from Gov. Matt Mead’s office, is trying to fix the problem.

Renny MacKay, a spokesman for Mead’s office, said the state first discovered the lack of negotiable pipeline corridors during the redrawing of a resource management plan in the Big Horn Basin.

Many say the area has high potential to be a successful area for companies seeking to flood oil fields with carbon dioxide, which can free trapped deposits. But to do that, pipeline needs to transport the gas to the fields.

MacKay said the governor was disappointed in the lack of corridors crossing BLM office boundary lines, so he dispatched members of his office and the pipeline authority to solve the problem.

Jeffries said in an early December interview his office is conducting an analysis to identify key pipeline corridor areas across the state. They hope to file an application with the BLM to use identified lands as pipeline corridors sometime in the first few months of 2013.

Once the application is in, the process could take several years to complete.

The application will spawn an environmental review process, which Jeffries expects to take at least a year. The BLM would then issue a draft environmental impact statement for public comment, review and revise that statement, and issue a final EIS, again open for comment. The final decision would be recorded only after each of those steps is completed, an arduous task but one required under federal law.

“That whole process could well take three or more years,” Jeffries said. “Patience is required.”

If the application is approved, it would result in identified pipeline areas that would be easier for companies to access via permits, although they could still opt to build lines outside the corridors.

“It will significantly improve turnaround time,” Jeffries said.

Jeffries said the areas will be especially significant as producers and operators in the state look to increase pipeline capacity, especially for crude oil and carbon dioxide — which is increasingly being used to boost oil and gas production totals.

“What we’re trying to achieve is making it, from a timing perspective, more attractive to invest in Wyoming,” he said. “If we can establish corridors ahead of time, when someone has a choice of whether to invest in Wyoming and run a bit of a gauntlet in the public lands process or invest in another state that has less public land, we want to make the gauntlet look less daunting.”